A FEW COPIES USED at Our Office: RE/Search #13: Angry Women

An enduring bestseller since its first printing in 1991, “Angry Women” has been equipping a new generation of women with an expanded vision of what feminism could be, influencing Riot Grrrls, neo-feminists, lipstick lesbians, and suburban breeders alike. A classic textbook widespread in college curriculae, “Angry Women” is the most influential book on women, culture, and radical ideology since “The Second Sex”. Sixteen cutting-edge performance artists discuss a wide range of topics–from menstruation, masturbation, vibrators, S&M and spanking to racism, failed Utopias and the death of the Sixties…

Product Description

Armed with total contempt for dogma, stereotype and cliche, these creative visionaries probe deep into our social foundation of taboos, beliefs and totalitarian linguistic contradictions from whence spring (as well as thwart) our theories, imaginings, behavior and dreams.

“I was tremendously impressed by Angry Women — brilliant interviewing that went way beyond the usual enquiries into feminist topics. A great piece of publishing.” — J.G. Ballard

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2 reviews for A FEW COPIES USED at Our Office: RE/Search #13: Angry Women

Rated 5 out of 5

admin –July 5, 2013

” This is hardly the nurturing, womanist vision espoused in the 1970s. The view here is largely pro-sex, pro-porn, and pro-choice. Separatism is out, community in. Art and activism are inseparable from life and being.”

Diamanda Galas: After many years of basic classical piano lessons, I studied these avant-garde piano works in university graduate school. Then I started playing with free jazz guys like David Murray, Butch Morris…post Albert Ayler, post-Coltrane musicians. At the time it was a very heavy black scene not open to women. But I had played piano for so many years that they couldn’t deny I could do it.

After playing piano for awhile with all these guys from the post-Ornette Coleman school, I thought, “No, the voice is the first instrument.” These players have always modeled their mode of expression after the voice. They revered singers like Billie Holiday; often, the way they played was a reaction to the voice. The voice is the primary vehicle of expression that transforms thought into sounds, thought into message. And beyond the words (with all due respect to them), the combinations of vocal and verbal energy can be overwhelming.

I started working on my AIDS project (Plague Mass) over two years before my brother became ill. Half my friends are HIV-positive; this is my life. These journalists who are outside the community look at my work and it scares them because it’s the voice of the people who are sick themselves. Because it doesn’t offer “entertainment,” they can’t imagine that people want to hear it. They look at music as a placating medium…I separated my work from a safe and useless concept of “music” back in 1974. Music that is truly meaningful contains a distillation of reality–and usually that’s tragedy.

Excerpt: bell hooks

RE/Search: What do you write?

bell hooks: I started out writing plays and poetry, but then felt I’d received this “message from the spirits”: that I really needed to do feminist work which would challenge the universalized category of “Woman.” Years ago certain ideas were prevalent in the feminist movement, such as, “Women would be liberated if they worked.” And I was thinking, “Gee, every black woman I’ve ever known has worked (outside the home), but this hasn’t necessarily meant liberation.” Obviously, this started me posing questions: “What women are we talking about when we talk about ‘women’?”

So I began doing feminist theory challenging the prevailing construction of womanhood in the feminist movement. I wrote Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which initially met with tremendous resistance and hostility because it was going against the whole feminist idea that “Women share a common plight.” I was saying that in fact, women don’t share a common plight solely because we’re women–that our experiences are very, very different. Of course, now that’s become such an accepted notion, but 12 years ago people were really pissed.

I remember people being enraged because the book challenged the whole construction of white woman as victim, or white woman as the symbol of the most oppressed. Because I was saying, “Wait a minute. What about class differences between women? What about racial differences that in fact make some women more powerful than others?” So that’s how I started out. I continued to do my plays and my poetry, but my feminist theory and writings became better known.

Excerpt: Susie BrightRE/Search: How did you start On Our Backs?

Susie Bright: At Modern Times bookstore I had been reading some of my poetry…somebody heard me reading these poems and a few days later I got a letter saying, “Hi, we’re two gals starting a magazine called On Our Backs…” When I read that I burst into laughter because I knew exactly why they were making fun of the feminist newspaper Off Our Backs which had been denigrating the sexual voices coming up in recent years.

They said they really liked my poetry–well, can you imagine? And it continued, “Would you like to submit some of your writing?” So I sent in some erotic work I had done, and also offered any help I could give. I had been doing “commie” papers, underground papers, and other radical propaganda since high school–I knew a little bit how to make it happen.

Eventually I called the phone number on the letter and asked “What’s up? I’ve been waiting every day for you to publish this magazine!” I realized that they were new to all this. They had some great material, but no money.

One of the founders, Debi, was a stripper. She knew so many gay strippers that she said, “Let’s have a ‘Lesbians Only!’ strip show to raise money for the first issue”–and that’s exactly what we did. I sold ads to everybody that I met through Good Vibrations; we sold advance subscriptions to people on the Samois mailing list. Then we took our first issue to the Gay Day parade and hoped it would sell enough so we could pay the printer the other half we owed–and fortunately, it took off.